


Shadow of Death

by Ransomedbard



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Bittersweet, Canon Divergence, Gen, Summer of Hilde 2020, Supernatural Elements, somber
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-21
Updated: 2020-09-21
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:48:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 5,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26581645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ransomedbard/pseuds/Ransomedbard
Summary: After Duo dies from wounds he received during his crash landing on the Moon, Hilde steals the Deathscythe Hell and attempts to forge her own path as a rebel pilot under the command of Professor G. But despite her hard-won victories, she finds she cannot escape the shadow of the previous pilot of the suit...
Comments: 9
Kudos: 6





	1. Chapter 1

_Thirty five hours after the crash  
Lunar Complex, Building Twelve, Storage Block D-5_

Hilde descended the long metal ladder to the subterranean storage area where she had hidden Duo. She tried to step lightly on the rungs, but the noise reverberated in the narrow confines of the ladder chute, and Duo called up to her, his voice far too loud.

"Is that you?"

"Shhhh," she hushed him, and he fell quiet until she reached the bottom and knelt near him.

"I've come back empty handed," she began, too tired to break the news to him gently. "I didn't find your suit, the scientists, or even anything to eat." 

She lifted the dull metal canteen from the floor by his side and was displeased to find it as full as when she had left him four hours before. "We still have water," she offered, pouring out some of the brackish contents into the cup and holding it near his face.

"It's alright, you have it." His tired eyes meandered, now unfocused, now latching on to her. 

He looked far worse. His cheeks were ablaze with fever and the skin on his arms and hands was mottled with purple.

She felt hopeless to help him. He had steadfastly and strenuously refused every argument she had made for turning themselves in to OZ, always maintaining that she would find a way to his Gundam. Even now, when he was gravely ill and only intermittently coherent, his belief in her was unwavering, buoyed by a genial mood she could not understand. While she was relieved he didn't seem to be suffering, his calm and good spirits seemed almost grotesque given how dire the situation was. 

For her part, Hilde was at the limit of her endurance, racked with fear for both their lives and her repeated failure to find a means of saving them. Overcome, she slumped to the floor and cradled her head.

After a minute he noticed, and though his eyes were now fluttering shut, he turned his head in her direction. 

"You're gonna be alright. You remember everything I told ya about my buddy, yeah? Once you find him, he'll get you out."

"We'll both get out. I won't leave you behind."

He nodded. "I'll be right there with ya when you go."

Something about the way he said it seemed wrong, but she was too exhausted to make sense of it. She curled onto her side and quickly fell into a deep slumber.

It felt like only moments later that he woke her, his feverish hand gripping her forearm lightly. "Listen. Don't fight those dolls - they're killers. You have to just run, you understand? Don't fight them none."

Past caring about anything but sleep, she wrenched her shoulder back to dislodge his hand. Then she crawled out of his reach, knowing he was too weak to follow, and passed out again.

An hour later, she woke to his laughter. It was a true laugh, the kind that bursts forth despite any attempt to stop it, punctuated by little gasps to catch his breath.

She opened her eyes and found he was looking right at her - or rather through her - as he rambled.

Wiping a tear from his eye he exclaimed, "Oh, that's just too funny — I shouldn't laugh at such a thing but — it didn't work for you, either!"

She slipped away to the sound of that laughter. The next time she woke, he was dead.


	2. Chapter 2

_Twenty two hours after Duo's death  
Lunar Complex, Building Eight, North Hangar_

When she had finally stumbled upon his mobile suit, it seemed almost too easy. The Gundam was unguarded and the path out of the base clear of obstruction, save the hangar bay doors which were shut. 

She managed to make her way into the cockpit and get halfway through the suit start-up process before she was noticed.

"What do you think you're doing?"

The sardonic voice cracking out of the console speakers made her reflexively flinch away from the controls, but she recovered herself and kept working.

"Are you the professor?" she asked, hating how the quaver in her voice betrayed her fear.

"Who's asking?"

 _He's crabby_ , Duo had said. She took a chance that it was him. 

"I'm on your side. I know Duo - he told me about you, the rebels, and this suit. He told me as much as he could," she said all in a rush, unable to soften the blow, "before he died."

The pause was not as long as she expected. "How?"

Despite herself, she slowed and then stopped, caught up in the fresh shock of his death. "On our way down to the surface, his Leo was shot up and landed too rough. His leg was broken - a compound fracture - and he got a severe concussion. We managed to get inside the base and hide, but after that he rapidly became too weak to move, spiked a high fever, and...I'm sorry." She found she was wringing her hands.

Her faceless interrogator's voice expressed little change in emotion. "So he's dead, and you think that gives you the right to take the suit?"

"I - I need to escape. And he didn't want OZ to have it. If I take it, I can use it to help the Colonies fight back. He said… he said you would help me." 

Silence. 

"I can do it. I know what I'm doing," she bluffed.

"Oh I very much doubt that. But even if you do, the suit's not finished. You might die in any number of ways."

There was a deep _clang_ that shook the suit beneath her, and she realized the bay doors in front of her were beginning to open to the vacuum of the lunar surface. She quickly sealed the cockpit hatch and scrambled to strap herself into the harness, knowing that OZ would come quickly to investigate.

The voice spoke again with a careless drawl. "Let's see how far you get." 

As she frantically lit the Gundam's engines, Hilde thought she heard the sound of Duo's laughter.


	3. Chapter 3

_Fourteen hours after escaping the Lunar Complex  
Hidden in the derelict mining space station "Derecho"_

"Well, you made it farther than I thought."

The sardonic voice woke her from a hazy doze in the pilot's chair.

He was sending video this time - a beak-nosed older man, short and rail-thin with a bowl cut of silver hair. He was seated at a table covered in small bits of complicated machinery, and a glass half-full of whatever alcohol filled the decanter beside it.

"No going back for you now, is there?" he continued. "After everything you've done - fired on your superior officer, aided a terrorist, and stole a rebel mobile suit." Apparently he'd been checking up on her.

"If you're trying to convince me to join you, I already said I wanted to."

The old man frowned and changed the subject. "My captors found the boy's body where you said it would be. Once they confirmed his prints, they chucked him out an airlock. A sad end for a god."

"A god?"

"You didn't know? He called himself a god of death, and he cheated it so many times I couldn't help but wonder…" He took a long drink from the glass, then scrutinized her through the camera.

"Well thief, who are you, anyway?"

She suspected he already knew, not that she had any plans to lie. "My name is Hilde. I was a volunteer for the Colony Defense Forces."

"A shoddy OZ puppet, then."

"I wanted us to be free of the Alliance at any cost. I thought OZ was the way. But now I see they're no different. The Colonies are going to be right back where we started - or worse - if we don't get rid of them, now."

Her questioner's stony expression did not change.

"And what experience do you have as a mobile suit pilot?"

"I've flown ships—"

He cut her off with an impatient wave of his hand. "Any fool can do that. Suits, girl, do you know anything about them?"

"I've been piloting a Leo since August. Before that, they gave us three months training in a simulator."

The professor's laugh was so scornful that it was barely laughter at all. " _Four months_? You think you can pilot any mobile suit in battle, let alone a Gundam, in _four months_?"

"Please, give me a chance..." she sputtered, then stopped, unsure if anything she could say would sway him.

"With what I have to work with, is it any wonder that the Colonies never win?" he asked rhetorically, as he pulled a keyboard in front of him and began typing. "Fine. You can still be made useful. As a distraction, if nothing else."

Her console lit up with a data transfer. "I've sent you coordinates for a nearby Sweeper ship. They won't be showing you any favors, but they'll repair what they can and keep you alive."

"Remember that you work for me - and that this arrangement only lasts as long as you can meet my requirements."

Hilde straightened up and saluted. "Yes, sir."


	4. Chapter 4

_Three weeks after joining the rebels  
Aboard the Sweeper tug "Bonny Belle"_

Whether it was mercy or a lack of faith in her abilities, the orders the professor gave her during the first week were not difficult. He sent her on long scouting missions on the edges of L4, to watch OZ's manufacturing operations there. The suit's unique cloaking system made it the perfect choice, and she was able to complete all of his orders unseen and unhindered.

That ended when he directed her to seek out and eliminate a small cargo ship guarded by two Leos.

Fighting alone and as the aggressor felt different than anything she'd done before. She missed the assurance of protocol, the moral surety of defending against attack as she'd done in most of her training drills, and the camaraderie of her old team. 

_Is this what being a rebel is really like?_

She had tried practicing on her own with the scythe and found it unwieldy and slow; impressions her first combat confirmed. She hated it. _Who builds a melee weapon for a mobile suit?_ It was ridiculous. 

In that initial battle she had used the element of surprise to deal the ship a deadly blow, but then had to contend with both mobile suits. She had laid all about with wild strikes and only won by outlasting her adversaries due to the strength of the Gundanium plating and her suit's superior speed. She took the guns from her defeated opponents with a mixture of guilt and relief - at least next time she'd have a weapon she knew how to use.

Since then, she had fought twice more in similar situations - taking out pairs of Leos on guard duty, forcing OZ to move more units to the area to protect their supply lines. Her suit was still not complete, and she spent the rest of her time transiting to remote rendezvous points with the rebel-allied Sweeper ships that could repair it.

The crews were cool to her and kept their interactions - and her time on their vessels - brief. Understandably, having a suit on board that had been stolen from OZ was a risk for them. And some of them may have known Duo personally and were still grieving the news. 

But she also overheard them disparaging her as "the replacement" - "a trade down," as one put it. Apparently Duo was the only pilot that Deathscythe had ever had.

She understood the idea of a pilot having a familiarity with a certain suit, especially a custom one such as the Gundams, but the idea of a single pilot didn't make sense to her. Mobile suits were machines, and needed far less downtime than the humans that flew them. In the Colony Defense Forces there had been many more pilots than Leos, and she wasn't sure she had ever been assigned the same suit twice. But the rebels operated differently, and while it eased her fear of being kicked out of the pilot's seat, it meant that she had no relief, either; every mission, no matter how long, was hers alone.

The laughter that she had first heard when escaping the moon base had not been a mere fluke; it had followed her into space. Every time she heard it, her mind was convinced it _was_ Duo's voice; not some memory being replayed, but happening here and now. Sometimes she woke to the sound of his laughter in her ears, or heard it when she was alone - which was virtually all the time. But it came to her most often in the heat of battle, or when she was limping back to dock, some new damage marring the once-pristine Gundam. 

She knew she wasn't actually hearing anything, that it was some trick of her mind brought on by her survivor's guilt and the sad circumstances of his death. Yet to her ears it seemed real, would even seem to come from some specific location in the cockpit beside or behind her, as if some last bit of him was still bound to the suit he had called his friend.

Duo Maxwell. Who had he been? Everyone was comparing her to him. She had never asked for that, never meant to take the role of his successor - she had barely even known him. What he liked to eat, or to listen to; his favorite movies or hobbies - she had no idea. 

And yet in those hours after the crash, after they were well hidden and before his fever had grown so high as to render him delirious, he had told her many things - who he loved, who he hated, his secrets, his regrets, even his unique ideas on what awaited him after death. He had turned their dark hiding place into a confessional, and not knowing what else to do for him, she had listened. 

Nearly a month had passed and she still didn't know what to do with his scattered thoughts, the burden of knowing such intimate details about a near-stranger. The only person who she talked with regularly was the professor, and he hardly seemed one to want to reminisce about "the boy," as he called him. So she tried to set it aside, with the vague hope that one day after the conflict was over she could seek out a few of the people that he had told her about and let them know how he had felt, to give herself the solace that his last words would bring comfort to them. Perhaps then the laughter would cease.


	5. Chapter 5

_Seven weeks after joining the rebels  
L3 Colony Cluster_

Hilde's illusions about the norms of combat and her own principles had been ground away by the missions Professor G set for her. Always fighting against the odds, she was disgusted with how quickly she had adopted any dirty trick she could think of - rebroadcasting recorded distress codes to lure an OZ ship into an ambush, or booby-trapping a dead pilot's suit with bombs to take out whoever came to investigate the missing patrol. _It's for the Colonies_ , she tried to reassure herself, but her voice in her own head rang hollow, and even Duo's laughter seemed to take on a bitter tone.

During her darkest hours her head spun with wild schemes of how to leave, to somehow abandon the Gundam and slink back into civilian life. But the impossibility of eluding OZ and their Colonial adherents caught her up short. She couldn't even imagine turning herself in to the government - the professor had been sure to let her know that her actions on the Moon had earned her a death sentence from her former command, let alone everything she'd done since then.

One night she made the mistake of using Deathscythe Hell's computer to search for a way out. She had tried to do so covertly, but the backlash was immediate.

"I built that suit, did you really think I didn't have a backdoor into it?" he spat, glaring into the camera as he excoriated her. "Even the boy could never lock me out; you never stood a chance."

Hilde's frustration overcame her fear and she snapped. "If I'm so incompetent then get someone else to pilot!"

The old man chuckled disdainfully. "Can't do that. Suicidal fools are hard to come by."

Duo's familiar laughter chimed in her left ear, distracting her. She pushed it aside angrily. "I'm _not_ suicidal - I'm willing to die for the Colonies. There's a difference."

The professor shook his head, now more grim than irate. "The moment you took that suit you signed your own death warrant. It takes an exceptional student to make a Gundam pilot. I trained the boy for three years to make him as good as he was."

"Then train me!" she shot back, yelling in frustration.

"Are you too dense to understand? I am a prisoner now - I have neither the time nor the resources, even if I wanted to."

But that night he sent her an encrypted transmission which took hours to download. When she opened it, she found it was full of files from the original Deathscythe - recordings from previous missions that had been recovered from the mangled main computer before it was rebuilt. 

Playing them back took over her entire cockpit. The three main screens - left, center, and right - played back what the Deathscythe's cameras had captured of the battle. All along the top were data feeds - location, speed, acceleration, and the real-time analysis of the enemy vessels. Near the bottom were superimposed line drawings of the state of the control sticks and pedals, lighting up as they were moved or buttons pushed. There was no sound, no image of inside the cockpit or of anything human, unless by chance an enemy suit was destroyed in such a way to show a glimpse of the doomed pilot. 

She watched them all over and over again, knowing that they were a way of learning from the boy she had met how to better pilot this suit, to soak up his strategies and techniques. But she found herself disquieted by the lack of any hint of his presence, as if in dying he had been erased. 

Her studies were not a great success, but she did pick up some of his tactics for ambushing an opponent, his trick of hitting two targets with an overhand swing and its rebound. She began to rely a little more on the scythe in battle, on the strength of its double beams that could cut through anything short of Gundanium, and she thought that better technique alone explained her increased success. She never recognized the psychological impact that the suit and the scythe together had on her opponents, the fear that caught hold of them when it appeared out of the dark like a thing from a nightmare to cut them down.


	6. Chapter 6

_Eleven weeks after joining the rebels  
In transit between L2 and L4_

"02, is that you?"

A call was coming in on an encrypted channel, but it wasn't the sarcastic tones she was used to - it was the voice of a young man, excited and hopeful.

"Duo, I see you - come on, answer me!"

With a sick feeling in her stomach she realized it was one of the other Gundam pilots. _They don't know he's dead._

The professor had told her to maintain strict radio silence, so she activated her camouflage and slunk off quietly under the cover of Deathscythe Hell's cloak. 

But a week later, there was another voice in the dark, this time so far off that they couldn't have seen her, but simply were broadcasting on the channel at random, in the hopes of being heard. The calls kept trickling in, and she felt the guilt of inaction on her hands. These were the friends he had spoken about in glowing terms during that first night of hiding when he still had hope for a rescue. 

_They always show up when I least expect it. They've gotten me out of worse scrapes than this._

They may not have saved him, but they were still looking for him even now.

"It's cruel," she pleaded with the professor. "Can't you just tell them he's gone, or let me do it?"

"No," he commanded, without looking up from his work. "I won't risk it; they're driven enough by emotions as it is. Say nothing. Avoid them."

She let it go, because it wasn't worth risking his wrath. 

As time went on, the calls became less frequent, but now when they spoke it wasn't as individuals, but as a group.

"Please, just tell us anything you can about him," pleaded what she has come to think of as the hopeful voice.

"I know you aren't him. Whoever you are, you're a thief and a coward." That was the hard voice. 

The proud voice, which never pleaded or threatened put an end to the conversation. "Save it. This is pointless. Whoever this pretender is, they're nothing more than a shadow animating his suit."

After that, the calls stopped. Even though they had made her feel racked with guilt, she found she missed them. 

At least the laughter never deserted her; it always came back. It varied slightly, sometimes simply amused, other times holding an edge of apology, as if he were embarrassed at laughing at her peril. She had felt every emotion on the spectrum between horror and hatred for that laughter, but now she had come to accept it. She no longer judged herself for being unable to get rid of it. 

_So I've gone a little bit mad_ , she reasoned. _At least he sounds happy_. She even began to talk back to the laughter now and again, but it never answered.


	7. Chapter 7

_Four months after joining the rebels  
Aboard the Sweeper barge "Nawab"_

Hilde finished her report with a smile of satisfaction on her face. She had taken out a small squad of half a dozen Leos in combat, a personal best.

"Well done," the professor said, and she realized it was the first time he'd ever praised her. "I never would have picked you, but I have to admit it's nice having someone who actually follows orders for a change."

"Now, I need you to come back closer to the _Libra_." He and the other scientists had been moved there by OZ and forced to work on the battleship's main weapon, a massive beam cannon. The Colonies has been told it was designed to protect against an attack from the Earth, but the scientists feared that once completed, it could just as easily be turned against the Colonies. "We believe the new model mobile dolls will be on the move soon." 

Hilde bit her lip, remembering with shame when she had crawled away from Duo's dying warning about the dolls. _Don't fight them none_ , he had pleaded. From the outset the professor had given her a similar command, and had avoided sending her on missions where the rebels expected mobile dolls to be present. Thus she had seen them rarely and aborted the few missions where she had encountered them unexpectedly. 

It rankled her at times, as she and Duo had briefly fought them on their ill fated trip to the Moon. The dolls they encountered had fought well enough for automations, but they didn't seem to her to pose such a tremendous threat as everyone else believed.

"Do you want me to test this new model?" she ventured, only to have the acerbic old man roll his eyes at her.

"If I didn't want you to fight the _old_ ones, why would I send you after something _better_?" he rasped. "Get it through your head: if you fight mobile dolls, you'll lose. Especially these. The new model of the Virgo compensates for the shortcomings of the first. It can keep up with your suit now, has a reaction time that is faster than you could hope to compete with, and they coordinate almost instantaneously." 

He sighed and ruffled a hand through his hair. "Perhaps if I had had the time to put the ZERO system in," he muttered to himself, "but no, you'd never have been able to handle it." Seeing her about to question him, he ended the call with a curt command - "Leave within the hour. Signal me when you arrive."

Hilde packed her little bag, let the ship's mate know she was going, and made her way to the hangar where her suit stood.

Like the other Sweeper ships Hilde had docked in for repairs, this vessel had neither the personnel nor the equipment capable of melting and reforging gundanium alloy, so the damage to Deathscythe Hell's plating could not be repaired. Fortunately it was so strong that it took many direct hits to the same spot to weaken it, but over time it had become dented and distorted. Lately she had been warned several times that it wouldn't hold out forever. When she asked them what could be done, the engineers only shook their heads and reinforced what they could from the inside with conventional materials.

As she reeled herself up to the cockpit on the winch, she looked up at the suit's great black wings riddled with scars and the pocked, somber face.

"You are an ugly brute," she told it, then instantly regretted her words. It had been pristine when she first stole it from OZ, so whatever damage it bore had been due to her piloting. And despite how it looked, its strength and agility had saved her life many times over. She remembered Duo's warm praise for the mobile suit, his affection for it which she had dismissed as childish back then. 

"Do you miss him?" 

She touched the gigantic leg that was passing by in front of her, let her palm slide over the rough and wounded metal in a gesture of condolence.

"I'm sorry. I'm all you've got now."


	8. Chapter 8

_The day of the assault on Libra_

The uprising of White Fang and their takeover of OZ's battleships and dolls had thrown the rebels into chaos. Many of Professor G's extensive network of contacts had gone over to their side. 

Hilde herself had been extremely reluctant to attack White Fang, given that they were Colonials. Even the fact that they were holding the scientists as prisoners and forcing them to complete the _Libra's_ main cannon failed to sway her at first. 

"But they know you built weapons and suits for OZ," she had argued. "It's only natural that they don't trust you yet." 

"Quinze knows all too well where our loyalty lies," the professor replied, alluding to some connection he didn't bother to explain. " _We_ are the true voice of the Colonies and the hope for a lasting peace. He would make the Colonies into another oppressor and repeat Earth's mistakes."

Ultimately she had conceded that White Fang had gone too far - and by appointing a former OZ officer like Zechs to lead them, they had shown their true goal wasn't the freedom of the Colonies. _When will it ever end if we rebels fight amongst ourselves_? she wondered. But she accepted the necessity of taking down White Fang. The orders were not long in coming.

"Within the next few hours the Gundams - the true Gundams - will be making their attack on the _Libra_. You will wait until they engage and then draw off some of the defensive forces."

He sent her detailed charts of the assault plan for both the Gundams and Treize's soldiers from Earth.

"Give a wide berth to the Earth forces - they won't ID you as friendly. Hunt down the human White Fang units in these areas where they will deploy before engaging with Treize's troops. Your goal is to be as big a distraction as you can, for as long as you can. Doubtless all of White Fang's stolen mobile dolls will be activated for this battle - avoid them. But if you can't, remember your self destruct - your most powerful weapon against them. It's preferable to the alternative."

She shuddered. Every pilot feared asphyxiating in the vacuum of space. 

Duo's light laughter echoed in her ears, so close she could swear he was right behind her.

Her first target was a Leo transport carrier. It was formerly of the Colony Defense Forces - possibly even her old troop - but the identifying marks had been hastily painted over with the symbol of White Fang. 

She stayed cloaked nearby and waited patiently until she saw the Leo units exit on their way to engage Treize's forces. When they were a minute out, she struck.

It started well. The beam scythe tore through the bridge of the carrier, creating chaos and redirecting the Leos back to her. She played cat and mouse around the ship itself, never giving them a clear shot. After they caught on, she cloaked and sped away. 

She flew and scanned for a while, skirting the unfolding battle, until she found another target. It was a mobile doll carrier, but the dolls themselves were long gone, barely visible at the edge of her radar. 

_It's not much, but it's something._

She decloaked and cut a long gash along the bottom, severing the fuel lines to cripple it. Moving forward, she sliced through the front in a single stroke, shearing off the nose cone. She raised her scythe for another blow and saw from the corner of her eye a mobile doll emerging from the hold - they had left one behind!

Weaponless, it launched itself at her. She turned and rose out of its path, cutting off its legs as it passed by, but the torso still had jets to maneuver and it spun unexpectedly quickly to catch her. _It's one of the new models_ , she realized. For a moment everything was a tangle of arms as she fought to free herself, unwilling to let go of the scythe. Then a beam weapon hit her, and another.

_Where?!_

The mobile dolls that had left the carrier had reversed course and were returning, and firing as they came. But how could they aim at such an extreme distance?

‘They coordinate almost instantaneously', the professor had said. _This one must be sending targeting data to the others!_

She let go her scythe and grappled with the half-broken doll, straining to crush its maneuvering shoulder jets to cripple its propulsion. As it clawed at her suit ineffectually, she ripped off its left arm and finally managed to dislodge it, sending it hurtling off into space. 

The other mobile dolls were approaching fast - several dozen of them, nearly a full platoon. She collected her weapon and cloaked, setting off on an evasive course. Her pursuers continued to fire, coordinating their shots to blanket the area. Each time they hit her suit, they honed in on the resulting flare of heat, which Deathscythe Hell's cloak was unable to completely conceal. Between their top speed matching her own, and her attempts to throw them off by flying erratically, they were gaining on her. 

Relentlessly they followed and fired, and the damage to the cloak continued to mount. Its camouflage became patchy, and then failed completely; after that the mobile dolls were hitting with nearly every shot. Hilde was making her way back to the area where Treize's forces were engaged in battle with the greater part of the mobile dolls, but she knew she wouldn't make it that far before they caught up to her. Every part of her wanted to turn and fight, hating the feeling of being hunted, but she kept running for the mission, to delay them as long as she could. 

_Has it all come to an end like this? So soon?_

_Damn it!_

At last she turned suddenly and charged at them, flaring open the great black wings, now tattered and shot through. She unleashed every ranged weapon she had at once in a wasteful barrage as she closed the gap, hoping to buy time. But the battle was over almost as soon as it had begun; without the shield of her wings, the mobile dolls targeted her critical systems and concentrated their fire on weak points with merciless precision. Within seconds they had disabled the beams of her scythe, broken the joints of her suit's arms, and pierced the strained and battered metal of the cockpit with a handful of holes. She heard the soft hiss of air escaping her spacesuit.

Duo's laughter filled the cabin, overflowing, permeating her mind even in the midst of her all-encompassing desperation.

She thought again of the vacuum of space, of the panicked, accelerating cycles of gasping for one last breath. _No. Not like that._

Her fingers reached out, flipped open the cover that protected the self destruct switch. 

Hands back on the controls now, she let the useless scythe slip from her fingers and used what thrust she had left to speed faster on her course into the mobile dolls' front line. Her mouth broke into an open-mouthed grimace of triumph as they shifted only slightly to give way and let her enter their ranks, leaving them all within the radius of the blast that was about to come.

She pressed the self destruct lever home, and in a moment of absolute silence she heard it click into place.

Nothing happened. 

Futilely, she pressed down on the fully engaged lever again and again, until her hands fell away in defeat.

She did not see the mobile dolls that now surrounded her all raise their guns in unison; did not hear Deathscythe Hell's sirens ring out warning of the fatal barrage of shots as they burst through the threadbare armor and tore the suit apart. 

Her vision was transfixed by what she could only now finally both hear and see: a young god of death reaching out to her, laughing with mirthful eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to seasons-of-gundamwing on tumblr for running the “Summer of Hilde 2020” prompts event! 
> 
> The prompt for this story was “Concept: After Duo met Hilde and escaped, Duo died protecting her when crashing to the Moon. Hilde becomes the new Deathscythe Hell’s pilot.”


End file.
